Reflections on ethical issues in marketing …

Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science

Bridging Asia and the World

ISSN: 2163-9159 (Print) 2163-9167 (Online) Journal homepage:

Reflections on ethical issues in marketing management: An empirical examination

Lawrence B. Chonko & Shelby D. Hunt

To cite this article: Lawrence B. Chonko & Shelby D. Hunt (2018) Reflections on ethical issues in marketing management: An empirical examination, Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science, 28:1, 86-95, DOI: 10.1080/21639159.2017.1410774 To link to this article:

Published online: 12 Jan 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 20 View related articles View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science, 2018 VOL. 28, NO. 1, 86?95

Reflections on ethical issues in marketing management: An empirical examination

Lawrence B. Chonkoa and Shelby D. Huntb

aDepartment of Marketing, College of Business Administration, University of Texas, Arlington, TX, USA; bDepartment of Marketing, Rawls College of Business, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA

ABSTRACT

This article provides some reflections on our paper,"Ethics in Marketing Management: An Empirical Examination," originally published in the Journal of Business Research in 1985. We first offer some thoughts as to why our paper, and others from the same research stream, have been widely accepted by other scholars in the area of marketing ethics. We then offer some thoughts on research topics that researchers might consider as we attempt to further develop our knowledge in the area of marketing ethics. Finally, we provide some perspectives on how researchers can proceed in their research on ethical issues in marketing.

1985 Journal of Business Research

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 17 July 2017 Revised 6 August 2017 Accepted 17 September 2017

KEYWORDS Ethics; frequently cited papers; research topics; research on ethical issues

; ; ;

In the early 1980s, the authors formed a partnership to develop a research program on a topic of mutual interest: the subject of business ethics. The fruitful partnership resulted in series of research projects that produced several publications on marketing ethics (Chonko & Hunt, 1985; Hunt & Chonko, 1984, Hunt, Chonko, & Wilcox, 1984), corporate ethics (Hunt, Wood, & Chonko, 1989), advertising ethics (Chonko, Hunt, & Howell, 1987; Hunt & Chonko, 1987), and accounting ethics (Finn, Chonko, & Hunt, 1988). Many of the publications were subsequently highly cited in the literature, especially the one that is the subject of the present article, "Ethics and Marketing Management: An Empirical Examination" (Chonko & Hunt, 1985).

Originally published in the Journal of Business Research, "Ethics and Marketing Management" (hereafter, "EMM") received the 2000 Journal of Business Research/Elsevier Science Award for Exceptional Quality and High Scholarly Impact. The recognition that

CORRESPONDENCE TO Lawrence B. Chonko ? 2018 Korean Scholars of Marketing Science

Larry.Chonko@UTA.edu

JOURNAL OF GLOBAL SCHOLARS OF MARKETING SCIENCE 87

our paper received 15 years after its publication was gratifying and humbling. Now, over three decades after its publication, it is even more gratifying and humbling to know that it is still being cited frequently by ethics' researchers. Schlegelmilch and Oberseder (2010), using the Business Source Premier database, find that our paper has been the second most frequently cited ethics paper among marketing ethics articles published between 1960 and 2008. Furthermore, as of this writing, the article has received over 600 Google Scholar citations, with over half of the citations occurring in the last decade. We are honored that so many scholars have found our work helpful in crafting their research on ethical issues in marketing.

In the interests of encouraging further research efforts on marketing ethics, the Editor of the Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science, Arch Woodside, has asked us to reflect on certain aspects of EMM, and we are pleased to do so. Accordingly, this article will (1) briefly summarize our original article, with a focus on its major findings, (2) posit explanations for the article having been so well received in the literature, and (3) discuss some areas of marketing ethics that we believe deserve more attention.

A brief summary of EMM

EMM (Chonko & Hunt, 1985) began by pointing that marketing has long been charged with ethical abuse, at least in part, because marketing managers face some of the most troublesome ethical problems in business. After detailing some of the charges, we positioned our own work as responding to the call of the well-known review of marketing ethics by Murphy and Laczniak (1981). Specifically, the purpose of our research was to answer four questions. What are the major ethical problems facing marketing managers? To what extent does the AMA code of ethics address the major ethical problems? How extensive are the ethical problems of marketing managers? How effective are the actions of top managers in reducing the ethical problems of marketing managers?

To address the four questions, we analyzed data from a sample of 462 marketing managers who were drawn from a universe of 1076 usable responses from practitioner members of the American Marketing Association. The following issue was a very important, open-ended question in our study. In all professions (e.g. law, medicine, education, accounting, and marketing), managers are exposed to at least some situations that pose a moral or ethical problem. Would you please describe the job situation that poses the most difficult ethical or moral problem for you?

We phrased the question this way because our pretests had indicated that many marketing practitioners believed that our purpose was to isolate the marketing profession and criticize it for being unethical. Indeed, that was not our purpose. Therefore, the first sentence in the question was an attempt to "desensitize" the issue and increase the willingness of managers to respond to the question. The response rate was 55% on this question, which we interpreted as a significant success.

As to our research questions, we drew six major conclusions. For marketers, the most often mentioned ethical problem was bribery, which was followed by fairness, integrity, pricing strategy, product strategy, and personnel decisions. The most frequent ethical conflict marketers experienced was that of attempting to balance the demands of the company

88 L. B. CHONKO AND S. D. HUNT

against those of customers. Marketing managers reported many opportunities to engage in unethical behaviors, but they reported that few managers frequently engage in such behaviors. Marketing managers do not believe that unethical behaviors in general lead to success. Nevertheless, many believed that there are successful managers who do engage in questionable behaviors. Top management involvement is absolutely critical in setting the tone for ethical behavior in companies. Company codes of ethics were not related to the extent of ethical problems that marketing managers perceived in marketing.

Factors explaining the success of EMM

Schlegelmilch and Oberseder (2010) find that our paper has been the second most frequently cited ethics paper among marketing ethics articles published between 1960 and 2008. Therefore, by standard academic metrics, the article has been highly successful. No one can say with surety why some articles are highly cited and others are not. However, to provide some potential explanations for why EMM has been viewed favorably by other researchers, we first reviewed Schlegelmilch and Oberseder's (2010) "top ten" most frequently cited papers in the marketing ethics literature in search of commonalities. It seems to us that that these frequently cited articles share at least four similar characteristics, They (1) address important issues, (2) use an appropriate research design to address the issues, (3) draw credible, interesting conclusions, and (4) have implications for further research efforts.

We invite readers to review both our brief summary of EEM and the full text of the article. Most readers, we believe, will find that the study's research questions were important issues. Furthermore, the study employed a research design (perhaps the only research design) that could provide valid and reliable data to investigate the issues. That is, we engaged in an extraordinarily labor-intensive effort to carefully conceptualize and measure our major constructs, develop our questionnaire, and secure primary data from a large sample of respondents who were highly qualified to thoughtfully comment on ethics in their organizations. Also, our findings were not just interesting, but because of the quality of our measures, sample, and analysis techniques, the conclusions were credible ? readers believed they could rely on them. Finally, as we discuss in Chonko and Hunt (2000), EMM prompted other ethics' researchers to explore extensions of EMM.

If our proposed explanation for why EMM has been frequently cited is correct, the marketing discipline faces significant problems in the future. Unfortunately, reviewers and editors of marketing's major journals now routinely reject articles that address important issues using primary data from survey research designs. Instead, they view favorably those articles that address relatively insignificant marketing issues by interrogating secondary data sources using sophisticated, mathematical modeling techniques (Clark, Key, Hodis, & Rajaratnam, 2014; Lehmann, McAlister, & Staelin, 2011; Sheth & Sisodia, 2006). Indeed, today EMM would be summarily rejected because of potential "same source bias."

The dysfunctional publishing norms of marketing's major American journals constitute a problem for the study of marketing ethics, but for the marketing discipline as a whole. At the same time, the situation provides an opportunity for other journals to publish important, highly influential articles on both marketing ethics and other issues that will be frequently cited. We urge the editor and reviewers of the Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science

JOURNAL OF GLOBAL SCHOLARS OF MARKETING SCIENCE 89

to adopt publishing norms that focus on the importance of the issues being investigated, rather than level of methodological sophistication.

Areas of marketing ethics that merit more attention

In the following section, we offer some topics, in the form of research questions, that we believe merit more attention by ethics researchers. We base our recommendations on both Chonko and Hunt (1985) and (2000).

Opportunities for and frequencies of unethical behavior

In Chonko and Hunt (2000), we posited that it would be interesting to investigate, as the ethical climate was changing, how various populations viewed the opportunities for, and frequencies, of unethical behavior. The following is a snapshot of the current ethics opportunity situation (National Business Ethics Survey, 2013):

?The percentage of workers stating they observed misconduct fell to an all-time low of 41%, down from 45% in 2011 and the record high of 55% in 2009; a high percentage of it is committed by managers.

?The pressure to compromise standards was reported by 9% of workers, down from 13% in 20ll.

In a second snapshot examination of ethical misconduct, the Global Business Ethics Survey (2016), reported: ?16% felt others pressured them to engage in wrongdoing (13% all other companies) ?52% reported observing misconduct (45% in all other companies) ?Misconduct soared from 48% in companies with strong ethics cultures to 89% with

weak ethics cultures ?As in our survey in 1985, bribery is the most reported (79%) ethical breach

Perhaps it is time to replicate some of the questions in our initial work. Furthermore, the following issues need addressing.

?How are opportunities for unethical behavior viewed by members of specific occupations within marketing (e.g. sales, advertising, media, retailing, and supply chain)?

?How effectively are organizations implementing the American Marketing Association code of ethics?

?Have those firms that have aggressively implemented the American Marketing Association's code of ethics experienced a reduction in unethical conduct?

Ethics and success

We reported, "Marketing managers do not believe that unethical behaviors in general lead to success" (Chonko & Hunt, 1985, p. 238). In addition to revisiting this issue, researchers might consider shifting the level of analysis to the firm. Consider the following. Since 2007, the Ethisphere Institute has identified the "World's Most Ethical Companies." Over the course of 11 years, hundreds of companies have been listed as ethical, with some firms have making the list several times (only Starbucks has made the list each year).

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download